Bin Laden’s Personal Debt to Bush
Excerpt:
Just six months after 9/11 and three months after bin Laden evaded capture at Tora Bora, Bush personally began downplaying the importance of capturing al-Qaeda’s leader. “I don’t know where he is,” Bush told a news conference. “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”
Yet, with bin Laden at large, Bush enjoyed an advantage. He could use the specter of bin Laden as an all-purpose bogeyman to scare the American people. A living bin Laden allowed Bush to create a plausible scenario for additional al-Qaeda attacks inside the United States and thus the justification for Bush to assert unprecedented powers as Commander in Chief.
Bush also cited the continued threat from bin Laden to stampede the American people and Congress into supporting the invasion of Iraq. One of Bush’s key arguments was that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein might share weapons of mass destruction with bin Laden’s operatives. Most Americans weren’t aware that Hussein, a secularist, and bin Laden, a fundamentalist, were mortal enemies in the Islamic world.
Bush kept the American people in line as his administration touched off periodic panics over terrorism by pushing the color-coded warnings up the threat spectrum.
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http://consortiumnews.com/2012/04/04/bin-ladens-personal-debt-to-bush/[/url]
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